Tycoon aims for cheap cancer drugs

Indian pharmaceutical tycoon Yusuf Hamied revolutionized AIDS treatment more than a decade ago by supplying cut-price drugs to the world’s poor — and now he wants to do the same for cancer.

Hamied, chairman of generic drugs giant Cipla, last month slashed the cost of three medicines to fight brain, kidney and lung cancer in India, making the drugs up to more than four times cheaper.

“I hope we’ll cut prices of many more cancer drugs,” he said, adding that he wants to supply the cheaper drugs to Africa and elsewhere. “Reducing the price of cancer drugs is a humanitarian move.”

Hamied, 76, was pilloried by Western drug giants 11 years ago when he broke their monopoly by offering to supply life-saving triple therapy AIDS drug cocktails for under US$1 a day — one-thirtieth the price set by the multinationals.

The firms branded him an intellectual property thief while he accused them of being “global serial killers” whose high prices were costing the lives of AIDS patients.

“What he did was path-breaking. It has been very important in saving lives, and what he is doing with cancer drugs is the same,” said Leena Menghaney, a lawyer with humanitarian group Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).

In 1972, India made only the process for making drugs patentable, not the drugs themselves.

This meant firms could “reverse-engineer” or change methods used to make medicines and sell them at up to one-fiftieth of US prices.

The legislation gave a huge leg-up to India’s generics industry and gave the nation the nickname “the pharmacy to the Third World.”

However, in 2005, India brought its law in line with WTO rules recognizing 20-year patents, pushing up the prices of newly launched drugs.

Cipla, India’s fourth-largest pharmaceutical company by sales, has been pressing the government to allow widespread use of “compulsory licenses,” which are permitted under WTO rules.

The licenses allow companies to make existing life-saving drugs to sell in countries where they are otherwise priced out of reach.

India’s first such license was granted in March to Natco Pharma to produce a generic version of Bayer’s blockbuster kidney cancer drug Nexavar, cutting the price from 28,000 rupees (US$500) for a monthly dose to 6,840 rupees.